My mother committed suicide
When my mom was first taken away in an ambulance, I remember hearing scraps of orderlies coming from the front seat - they were discussing boots and herring bought at a discount under a fur coat, but I didn’t understand how to talk about such things when a person dies next to me? For doctors, these are working days, but then I repeated myself many times in my life: no one is obliged to know your history, no one is obliged to sympathize, choose words and treat you in a special way. I don’t talk about the experience in my public space, and outside the psychotherapist’s office no one also tells how to live with it further. My mother tried to commit suicide twice, and the second time she did it.
TO
When I was fourteen and I was completely absorbed in pubertal experiences, my mother left a man with whom she had long tried to create, as they say, a normal family. He left, taking with him a lot of money for our family, so when he left for the sunset
relationship with my family is not over. By this time, I had already moved away from my unpleasant stepfather and, accordingly, from my mother: I didn’t touch his departure, and I knew almost nothing about the underlying causes of their disorder. Unless I was secretly glad that there would no longer be a stranger in my life, who occasionally put a lot of brutal effort into my “upbringing”: sometimes he just beat me. I did not have time to feel my mother's sufferings either: a long series of ships began, between which she went to work as usual, pulled me out to family holidays as usual, and in general behaved as usual. One day it became known that she lost the process - due to the lack of documents and any other evidence. Mom started a real depression.
The social status of depression today has changed a bit: it is easier for people who suffer from it to talk about it, it is easier to get help, and in the end it’s easier to admit that you have depression, and not just a blues. Outside the big cities, the situation is more likely the same as ten years ago: most of the people in Russia do not believe in depression, but they believe in people who for some reason like to suffer and be mentally lazy. In general, my mother did not even understand that she was unwell, and as a teenager I didn’t know such a word at all and was only able to follow Nietzschean advice about the tests that strengthen us.
Of course, they didn’t help Mom: if she didn’t go to work, she lay at home with the lights off and wept.
When it became clear to her that her condition did not change and did not pass by itself, she went to the doctor - the average provincial psychiatrist, who almost without looking prescribed her antidepressants. For some time, pills became a good engine, and my mother even began to turn into an active person. She wanted to get a correspondence higher education, went out to meet with friends, made some kind of relationship. She continued to visit the psychiatrist regularly - and it began to seem to me that our life was again becoming ordinary and quite happy. The fact that the pills every month became more and more, I was not embarrassed, but in vain: if the doctor does not try to remove the drugs from the patient’s life, but prescribes another cocktail of neuroleptics with nootropics, this means that the doctor is not very. Just remember this.
For the first time, everything happened so quietly and mundanely that I still do not understand how to treat this. Once I returned home from school and it seemed that I usually went to my room - the door to my mother's room was closed, it was quiet behind her, but nothing alerted me: sometimes she worked during the second shift and slept for several hours during the day. In the evening a grandmother came to visit - and already together we found out that mother was not sleeping. Just lies, can not speak and move.
In the bin, I found about twenty empty blisters, neatly nested in an empty pill box. She drank everything she was prescribed for these six months.
Drug overdose is one of the most popular ways of suicide, but it is not so easy to die from intoxication: if you try to commit suicide on time, you will definitely be saved. It happened to my mother: until the morning she was doing the washing and put on droppers. When I arrived at the hospital with the rest of my small relatives, she was already on her feet. She walked slowly, could not speak, constantly twirled her hat in her hands and dropped it on the floor. I lifted her and again gave her in her hands - and so many, many times on the way to the car. I became very scared. Mother did not go home - without special ceremonies and preliminary investigations she was sent to a psychiatric clinic in the region. Before the car door slammed, she managed to give me her jacket, saying that she no longer needed, and I could freeze.
M
We went to visit her every week. It was winter, and this place was remembered by me in the most terrible form possible: the typical Russian regional mental hospital is not a sanatorium at all. The huge territory, access to the visit opens on strictly defined days,
most of the buildings are destroyed, the smaller one is emergency boxes of two or three floors, where people, regardless of their condition, are held in identical chambers in a chaotic manner. People who tried to commit suicide, teenagers with mild frustration, old people in serious condition and permanent local inhabitants, from whom relatives have long refused. Naturally, no one wants to communicate with others and is waiting for visits from relatives. It seems that this nightmare for my mom ended pretty soon: after some time the local doctors, already filled up with constantly arriving patients, decided that she was quite healthy and could be allowed to go home. Mom came back with a pack of recipes and without wanting to change something.
It is difficult for me to describe these events and to be confident in all the details: from that period of my life I practically remember nothing, except that I was very much waiting for it to end.
I tried to live as I wanted, to be with friends, to fall in love, to study - but at home there was always a mother who cried for a long time almost every day.
They say that if you did not have depression, you will not understand what this condition is. But life near a depressed person is also an exhausting cycle, and it is easy for me to understand those who do not stand up. It seems that we lived, I finished school, my mother continued to work. During this period, our daily conversations were monstrous. Mom said she would definitely try again. She said she did not know who my father was. What sometimes regrets that did not have an abortion. I advised to rely only on myself and not trust anyone. It seems that only the spirit of contradiction and absolute ignorance saved me: I did not believe in the seriousness of her condition, I thought that it would sometime pass as suddenly as it began, and all her words were written off to a bad mood.
Mom continued to drink pills, every six months she went to the examination, none of which gave results - once she found a safe brain cyst and was released.
Antidepressants, it seems, she drank without a break for about four years: she started having headaches, she gained weight, stopped painting over gray hair.
Worst of all, the circumstances did not contribute to recovery at all: her relatives, including me, were not indifferent, but no one ever tried to truly appreciate the seriousness of her condition. I graduated from school, entered the first course and went to Moscow - then my life began, which was not at all like what happened to me before.
I was finally able to start managing my life on my own - to the best of my abilities, of course. I learned to write, got a first job and continued to go home - less and less. Nothing has changed there: a constantly crying mother, who told me that she could no longer live. By that moment, I had almost resigned myself and even internally prepared for the fact that the worst could well happen. In parallel, I tried to control my own life and achieve my goals. Now, I rather blame myself for inattention and secrecy: I managed to partially save myself, but I was not at all able to help my mother. One morning they called me and said that she hung herself. Something stupid happened: neighbors flooded her apartment from above, she cleaned up, and then she took some rope and went out to the porch.
Then there were unpleasant funerals, from which I escaped, family insults - after all, it was me, the closest person for her, who had to save her from a serious condition, but how? - and the realization that I was left in absolute solitude. I did not feel, it seems, nothing special: no terrible despair, unwillingness to live. Everything was very simple and clear, I knew about her choice four years ago. Never ignore if a person tells you that he made such a decision - even if the conversation seems like a joke or a trick to you, in a large number of cases these words mean something.
WITH
Today, people with suicidal tendencies are in a decent zone of visibility, and it is better to talk more often about things that it is impossible to survive without loss. For me, this nightmarish period of life and its final was decisive. In any relationship today, I prefer
to save myself, attachment seems to me the possibility of condemning myself to a future break, the feeling of guilt I experience in constant mode. When I tell rare people about what I was going through, I often feel sorry for and surprised: my normality and relative success do not correspond well to what happened to me in the past and is happening to this day. I miss my mother and understand what a terrible joke life with her has played in a society that makes a person follow certain rules so that his existence can be considered full, and general disbelief in the real danger of mental illness. In some kind of vacuum ethics, I admit that in her situation there was simply no other solution: no one, including herself, knew what to do - we just waited for “to pass by itself”.
It is very difficult to survive and accept any death, but suicide has a special status: to many, it seems to be the choice of a “weakling” who simply could not cope otherwise. This is not so: healthy people are capable of “fighting and winning” actions, especially those who have support, but they need a lot. My mom had neither one nor the other. The worst thing I encountered was direct accusations against me of her death. A little later, I realized that in such circumstances, an ignorant teenager can do little to help an adult, and not all adults are capable of such help. Most likely, I will not once again have to face the fact that this story has not ended for me - at least I will have to stop being afraid of losses and learn to trust someone. Unfortunately, there are no perfect recipes, and there never will be: I try to just remind myself that this happens, but it also happens differently. The life of my mother was interrupted, but I would very much like the life of others to be different.
